[BioC] contributing to Bioconductor

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "MarkW" == Wilkinson, Mark <Mark.Wilkinson at stjude.org>
>>>>>     on Thu, 13 Mar 2003 10:10:36 -0600 writes:

    MarkW> A few weeks ago there was some talk about a 'heatmap'
    MarkW> function that would plot a heat map with two
    MarkW> dendrograms to show clustering (after hclust).  I
    MarkW> mentioned then that I had been cooking something up.
    MarkW> I feel like it's ready to give to the community to
    MarkW> use, test, break, etc.  Which leads me to my
    MarkW> question: How does one go about contributing a
    MarkW> function like this, whose singular purpose doesn't
    MarkW> warrant a package of its own?  Some packages of
    MarkW> Bioconductor seem like they might accommodate it now
    MarkW> or in the future, such as geneplotter, genecluster
    MarkW> (dev).  Should I email the maintainers of those
    MarkW> packages and try to convince them to wedge in my
    MarkW> little function?  Any advice?

heatmap() will be a function in the next version of R,
thanks to Andy Liaw [post to here] and Robert Gentleman. (and myself).
Robert Gentleman (mostly) and I (somewhat) have added
functionality to the "dendrogram" class in R's mva package.
heatmap() builds on that.

In general, e-mailing package maintainers is a good idea,
or even posting to the "R-devel" mailing list -- which is there for
the purpose of discussing future enhancements for R.

Depending on the topic, you might get more interested parties
than with the bioconductor list.

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum  LEO C16	Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)	8092 Zurich	SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408		fax: ...-1228			<><